Page 15 of Summer of '69
“If you’re interested in a test of wills,” Exalta says, “you’ve chosen the wrong opponent.”
“If the TV goes, I go,” Kate says.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Try me.”
Jessie wonders if she’s going to have her wish granted so easily. Will Kate leave Nantucket and take Jessie with her? She has never seen her mother and grandmother argue. Usually, Exalta states her wishes and everyone else bends over backward to accommodate her. Jessie knows they did have a battle when Kate announced she was marrying David Levin, but that was about true love versus religious bias. This is about…a television set. Kate must feel more passionately about the news broadcast than Jessie realized. She knows her parents watch Walter Cronkite every weeknight, but the same basic information can be found in theBoston Globe,and as far as television news goes, Jessie has to side with her grandmother. She finds it gruesome. She doesn’t want to hear the body count every night. Before Tiger left, it was just a number. Now, Jessie realizes, each body in that count was a person with a name and a family and talents and quirks and likes and dislikes. She also realizes that if Tiger dies, he will shrink to a number, one more body among tens of thousands.
Jessie can’t listen to Kate and Exalta another second. She slips out the back door to the cool fresh air of the yard. The yard is composed of a brick patio and a small plot of grass. Along the grass is a flagstone walk that leads to the property’s second dwelling, known as Little Fair, which fronts Plumb Lane. Little Fair is where Blair, Kirby, and Tiger stay. Upstairs, there are two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a small living space with a galley kitchen. Downstairs, there’s a third bedroom and a half bath. Around the side of Little Fair is an enclosed outdoor shower. According to Exalta, there is no reason to shower indoors during the summer, so although there are three full baths in the main house and a bathroom with a stall shower in this house, Exalta insists that everyone in residence at All’s Fair and Little Fair line up for the outdoor shower.
Jessie decides to check on things at Little Fair. She’s thirteen years old, and she knows that her siblings stayed by themselves in Little Fair as teenagers, but somehow she doubts she will ever be allowed to make the move to Little Fair. She might be able to use it as a clubhouse, however—a quiet place to read and escape the tensions across the yard.
As Jessie pulls open the screen door—the groan of the door is as familiar to her as her own voice—she wonders why Kate didn’t think to hide the TV in Little Fair. Exalta never comes over here.
The inside of Little Fair smells like bacon.Bacon?she thinks.Has someone been cooking in here?Jessie’s stomach growls. She peers in the downstairs bedroom that used to belong to Tiger. The bed is unmade and there’s a copy ofThe Godfatheron the nightstand. Jessie’s eyes flick to the closet. There are clothes inside, a man’s clothes.
What?
Jessie suddenly feels like Goldilocks. She tiptoes up the stairs because now she hears a noise, a repetitivethwack,and then a softly uttered curse word: “Damn.”
“Hello?” Jessie calls out. She pokes her head between the spindles of the railing and sees a boy, probably two or three years older than she is, lounging on the couch with one of those paddles with a ball attached by a rubber string. The boy wears only a pair of mustard-yellow bathing trunks, a choker of what looks like wampum beads, and a white rope bracelet.
He sits up. “Oh, hi. You’re Jessie, I bet.”
The boy is tan already and his hair has a glint of gold that Jessie knows can only be achieved by swimming in salt water and letting your hair dry in the sun. At least, that’s Kirby’s claim. Jessie’s hair is dark brown, and dark brown it remains all summer long. The boy’s rope bracelet is fairly new, Jessie notes; it’s still bone-white and loose on his wrist. Jessie has forgotten about rope bracelets. At the start of each summer, she and Kirby and Tiger would walk to the Seven Seas gift shop and each of them would pick out a brand-new clean white rope bracelet that would then shrink and weather with every swim. By the end of summer, the bracelet would be dingy gray and snug around Jessie’s wrist, but somehow Kate would wiggle the blade of the scissors between rope and skin to cut the bracelet off before they returned to Brookline.
“Who are you?” Jessie asks.
“Pickford Crimmins,” the boy says. “Call me Pick.”
“Pick,” Jessie says. “Are you related to Mr. Crimmins, then?”
“I’m his grandson.”
Grandson? Jessie didn’t know Mr. Crimmins even had a child, much less a grandchild.
“I’m Jessie,” she says. “Jessie Levin.”
“I know,” Pick says. “Bill told me about you.”
“You call your grandfather Bill?” Jessie calls her grandmother Exalta in her mind only; if she ever called Nonny Exalta to her face, she would be stuffed into the buttery for all eternity.
“That’s what he asked me to call him,” Pick says. “I met him for the first time at the beginning of May.”
“You just met yourgrandfather?” Jessie says.
Pick tosses aside his paddle game, gets up off the couch, and stands at the top of the stairs, where Jessie can get a better look at him. Pick is tall and lean…and cute, Jessie decides. Very cute, cuter than any boy at school, but that only serves to make her self-conscious. She loses her wits for a second, then regains them. What is he doing here?
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
“Making lunch,” he says. “Bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches on toasted Portuguese bread that Bill got from this place called Aime’s Bakery. You ever heard of it?”
Portuguese bread from Aime’s, another summer tradition that Jessie has forgotten about. Portuguese bread is a dense white that makes the world’s best toast. Some people buy twenty loaves at the end of the summer, take them home, stick them in the freezer, and enjoy the bread all year, but Exalta and Kate think this is cheating. Portuguese bread, like tomatoes and corn from the farm stand on Hummock Pond Road, is meant to be enjoyed only in the summer.
“Of course I’ve heard of it,” Jessie says. “They make chicken pies on Thursdays and brick-oven beans on Saturdays.”
“Good to know!” Pick says. “So, can I fix you a sandwich?”
